Monday, March 17, 2008

Slides and links from the Testing Tools tutorial

Here are my slides from the Testing Tools tutorial in PDF format. Not very informative I'm afraid -- I didn't actually show them to the attendees, I just talked about those topics while demo-ing them. If you want to find out more about the state of the Selenium project, watch this YouTube video of the Selenium Meetup at Google.

Here are some random thoughts on Selenium testing which I mentioned during the tutorial:

composing Selenium tests, especially for Ajax functionality, is HARD; the Selenium IDE helps a bit, but you still have to figure out how to wait for certain HTML elements to either appear or disappear from the page under test

version 1.0 of the Sel. IDE, soon to be released, will record Ajax actions by default, so hopefully this will speed up Selenium test creation

if you already have a Selenium Core test in HTML format, an easy way to obtain a Selenium RC test in Python is to open the HTML file in the Selenium IDE, then export the test case as Python; however, to actually make the resulting code readable/reusable, you have to do some pretty major refactoring

identifying HTML elements (or locators, as Selenium calls them) by their XPath value is hard, but it's sometimes the only way to get to them in order to assert something about them; I found tools such as XPath Checker, XPather and Firebug invaluable (they all happen to be Mozilla add-ons, but you can use Firefox to compose your tests, then run them in any browser supported by Selenium; however, YMMV especially when it comes to evaluating XPath expressions in IE)

because XPath locators are brittle in the face of constant HTML changes, please use HTML ID tags to identify your elements; I know at least one company (hi, Terry) where testers do not even start writing Selenium tests until developers have identified all elements of interest with an HTML ID

For people interested in FitNesse and on various acceptance testing topics, please see my blog posts in the Acceptance Testing and Web Application Testing sections of this page. If you are interested in how Titus and I tested the MailOnnaStick application, we have a whole wiki dedicated to this topic. Another resource of interest might be the Python Testing Tools Taxonomy wiki, with links to a myriad of Python testing tools.

I'll post soon on some topics that were discussed during the tutorial, especially on how to test an application against external interfaces or resources that are not under your control (think 'mocking').